Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 4:39 pm | By: Radical Russ
In the face of growing calls to tax and regulate marijuana, the prohibitionists are left with few tools in their rhetorical arsenal. One talking point they’ve trotted out lately goes something like this:
Why not tax pot and alleviate the financial burden of our cities and states? We tax alcohol sales and it earns billions. “The latest studies show that the U.S. collects about $8 billion yearly in taxes from alcohol.” However, this is not the end of the story. “The problem is, the total cost to the U.S. in 2008 due to alcohol-related problems was $185 billion, and the government pays about 38% of that cost (about $72 billion), all due to consequences of alcohol consumption, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism.”
In other words, if we “legalized” marijuana, the damage caused by all the rampant stoners would cost us more than the pot taxes would bring in.
Of course the argument is silly on its face; alcohol use causes serious health problems, violence, and auto wrecks, so it naturally costs society more than it brings in. Cannabis use is relatively safe and as I’ve argued before, 22 million of us are using it now, so if there is any social cost, why not at least bring in some tax revenue instead of none?
In terms of costs per user: tobacco-related health costs are over $800 per user, alcohol-related health costs are much lower at $165 per user, and cannabis-related health costs are the lowest at $20 per user. On the enforcement side, costs for cannabis are the highest at $328 per user—94% of social costs for cannabis are linked to enforcement. Enforcement costs per user for alcohol are about half those for cannabis ($153), while enforcement costs for tobacco are very low.
Now that’s Canada, so our US numbers may vary a bit, especially when we’re talking about health care costs. But in the title of his post, Paul asked me to “do the math”. So here it is:
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Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 10:15 am | By: Radical Russ
(Guardian UK) “I first took coke when I was 18 and at university. I remember two friends who did chemistry told me I should get really drunk first because it would mix into this new chemical in my blood and make me even higher,” a 30-year-old woman who works in publishing told the Observer yesterday.
What her friends did not tell her is that the combination of cocaine and alcohol in her then teenage body will have left a highly toxic chemical in her liver called cocaethylene.
For not only is cocaethylene toxic in the liver, it is also blamed for heart attacks in the under-40s and a surge in social problems. But because so little is known about the drug, few experts can agree on the nature of the threat to users, and indeed society as a whole.
Cocaine-related deaths are also increasing in the US. The US National Household Drug Survey estimated that around five million people used alcohol and cocaine each month.
Yes, but five million people also realize that they can have a great Friday or Saturday night out on the town, dancing and drinking til the wee morning hours, with a bump of coke every now and then, sleep it off Sunday, and unless their workplace random drug testing pops them early on Monday morning, they can probably pass a urine screen.
But if 14 million people wanted to have a fun weekend with a toke of a natural, herbal social relaxant shared communally among friends, knowing it is non-toxic to their liver and far safer to themselves and society than alcohol or cocaine or mixing the two, a workplace random drug test anytime in the next week to a month means chugging nasty-tasting body flushes and water or mixing up freeze-dried urine, strapping it to their thighs along with a chemical hand warmer and maybe even wearing a prosthetic penis to be certain they can beat the pee test and continue to pay their mortgages and feed their families.
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 10:23 am | By: Radical Russ
Make it more potent for the taste of it! Yeah, that's it!
When it comes to the popular recreational relaxant that is non-toxic and cannot kill you, its increasing potency is a cause for alarm:
(TIME Magazine) 25% of BC Bud is made of the psychoactive drug tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). In contrast, the pot that the hippie generation smoked in the 1970s had only 2% THC content, and most pot consumed in the U.S. today averages about 7% THC.
(Chicago Tribune) One thing has changed: Pot packs a bigger wallop now than it did in the ’70s. Today’s leaves are up to five times as potent. So, says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, still-developing brains, which are “more plastic, more sensitive to being modified,” are exposed to higher doses of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.
(ABC News) With stronger pot, emergency rooms have reported more associated accidents. Just this week, seven people were killed when the driver — drove the wrong way on a New York highway and collided head on with a pickup truck. Although the drivers family has disputed the results, toxicology tests showed high levels of alcohol and marijuana.
(New York Times) “It’s like drinking beer versus drinking whiskey,” said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a government agency and a strong opponent of legalizing marijuana. “If you only have access to whiskey, your risk is going to be higher for addiction. Now that people have access to very high potency marijuana, the game is different.”
(Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics) The new marijuana in the market place is not the 1 percent to 2 percent THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which is the psychoactive ingredient that produces the “high”. Today’s new cultivation methods are producing a drug with up to 30 percent THC, or 3,000 percent higher than the old 1960’s-1980’s available marijuana.
But if it is a popular recreational intoxicant that is toxic and can kill you, it’s increasing potency is a victory for connoisseurs and retailers:
(USA Today) A growing number of states are moving to allow higher alcohol content in beer, despite concerns from some substance-abuse experts.
Alabama and West Virginia have passed laws increasing the legal alcohol-by-volume cap for beer from 6% to as high as 13.9% this year. Similar efforts are underway in Iowa and Mississippi, two states with very restrictive limits on the sale of high-alcohol beer, said Sean Wilson, former president of Pop the Cap, North Carolina’s successful grass-roots effort that raised the state’s limit in 2005.
Vermont raised the cap to 16% and Montana to 14% last year.
The average alcohol content in beer is 4.65%, and in wine 11.45%, according to a 2002 study by the Alcohol Research Group in Emeryville, Calif.
Twenty states still place some kind of limit on the amount of alcohol in beer, Wilson said.
Paul Gatza, director of the national Brewers Association based in Boulder, Colo., said limiting alcohol content restricts flavors and styles because “you can’t put as much malt or other sugars in your beer as you may want to.”
Gatza said consumers of specialty or microbrewed beers, also known as craft beers, “don’t drink to get drunk. They drink to appreciate the flavors.”
Right… and I smoke pot because I appreciate the scents. This is a theme that goes back to the days of Nixon: the idea that people don’t drink to get drunk, they do it to socialize, but pot smokers are only smoking weed to get high. Tell you what, next time there’s a cocktail party, swap out all the beer for O’Doul’s, all the wine with grape juice, and all the cocktails with soft drinks, and let’s see how much the alcohol drinkers can socialize without getting a buzz on.
The reason alcohol drinkers can make this absurd statement is because they differentiate between the “socializing” (getting a buzz on) and the “getting drunk” (alcohol poisoning). They don’t conceive of a similar state for marijuana consumption. In their mind there’s “not smoking pot” and there’s “stoned out of your mind”, with no intermediate step. This is often because marijuana is illegal, so people who may have experimented a time or two did so under conditions that required smoking it all and smoking it quickly. They’ve never experienced an Amsterdam-like nice mellow joint followed by a productive day. So an increase in cannabis potency, to them, means the pot that used to get them “stoned out of your mind” will now get their kids “way stoned out of your mind”.
Meanwhile, having worked for fifteen years in bars every weekend, bars with parking lots full of cars that I can guarantee weren’t all driven by designated drivers, I can tell you that consumers of microbrews are doing it to get drunk. The guy who was pounding 4% beers at $2 a glass will be more than happy to pound 16% beers at $5 a glass, knowing that his $20 in beer money may only get him four microbrews compared to ten tap beers, but he can get drunker quicker and take fewer pee breaks for the effort, and the beer tastes better.
Isn’t it amazing? Here we have a drug we know kills 35,000 people a year directly from ingestion and another 40,000 due to its effects, a drug that is proven to cause serious harm to every organ in the body, a drug at the heart of a vast majority of domestic abuse cases, crimes, and assaults, and not only are states deciding to allow it to be up to four times more potent, but the marketers of the drug are boasting that it also tastes better and the increased potency doesn’t matter. But marijuana that kills no one, is non-toxic to cells and organs, and brings people together in peace and communion, when that becomes up to four times more potent it is serious cause for alarm.
I guess we better not tell them that the marijuana tastes better these days.
Overall, “the public health burden of cannabis use is probably modest compared with that of alcohol, tobacco, and other illicit drugs,” Australian researchers reported in the Oct. 17 issue of The Lancet.
Wayne Hall, PhD, of the University of Queensland in Herston, Australia, and Louisa Degenhardt, PhD, of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, reviewed nearly 100 studies covering acute as well as chronic effects of marijuana, including reports of the prevalence of marijuana use around the world.
Globally, they wrote, about 3.9% of the world’s population used marijuana in 2006, according to United Nations statistics.
Well it opens nicely by noting that cannabis is safer and that almost 1 out of 25 people worldwide use cannabis. It gets a bit dicey from there:
They spent more time detailing the psychomotor impairments associated with the marijuana high. “Some experimental studies have shown diminished driving performance in response to emergency situations,” Hall and Degenhardt said, findings also corroborated in epidemiological studies.
For example, one study of car crash victims found that they were more likely to have tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive component of marijuana, in their blood compared with age- and sex-matched controls.
Another study determined that motorists killed in wrecks were 2.5 times as likely to have been responsible for the accident when they had THC in their blood.
These are meaningless points when you recognize that:
Marijuana is the third-most used drug after alcohol and tobacco, so it is not surprising you’d find it in car crash victims;
Marijuana is detectable in the blood long after most other drugs, including alcohol, are not; and
Recent studies show that people can test positive for THC in the blood up to a week after ceasing their use of cannabis.
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 3:57 pm | By: Radical Russ
Click here to read the actual marijuana booklet produced by the Foundation for a Drug-Free World
Right off the bat, you’ve got to distrust anyone called the Foundation for a Drug-Free World. Might as well be called the Coalition for an Ice-Free Antarctica or the Alliance for a Sand-Free Sahara. Not only is it a completely unattainable goal, but also an undesirable one. Do we really want a world without Lipitor, OxyContin, or Prozac? (Not good drugs, silly, they mean the bad drugs.)
This is one of thirteen little booklets, similar to the “Man or Monkey” and “Are You Saved” cartoon booklets you find left by religious proselytizers in phone booths, that you can order for free from the Foundation for a Drug-Free World. The 24-page booklet on marijuana may just set an Anslinger Rating record.
Let’s start with Page 7, displayed above, which compares alcohol and marijuana.
Alcohol consists of one substance only: ethanol.
Which, we should note, is a poison that is toxic to healthy cells and organs. When metabolized by the body, it produced acetaldehyde, an organic chemical linked to cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract. Recent studies show that lifetime use of alcohol corresponds to a greatly increased risk of cancer.
Marijuana contains more than 400 known chemicals, including the same cancer causing substances found in tobacco smoke.
Yes, which makes marijuana much like every other plant that also contains hundreds of chemicals. The carcinogens are found in marijuana smoke, but also found in marijuana smoke are cannabinoids that seem to mitigate the carcinogens. In thirty years of study, Dr. Donald Tashkin tried to find a link between marijuana smoke and cancer and instead found a protective effect against cancer.
Alcohol is eliminated from the body in a few hours, but THC stays in the body for weeks, possibly months, depending on the length and intensity of usage. …the chemicals in marijuana, some of them cancer-causing, remain in the body long after the drug is taken.
Main metabolic route for delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).
Alcohol is eliminated from the body by the liver, which over time with drinking can no longer do the task, one gets cirrhosis, and one dies. Meanwhile, THC is actually metabolized by the body within hours, and the remaining inactive metabolites, THC-COOH and glucuronide, are neither impairing nor carcinogenic.
THC damages the immune system. Alcohol does not.
These studies purporting that marijuana harms the immune system are ridiculous and achieved by using impossibly high doses of THC to cells in a lab. No studies have shown that pot smoking among humans has any effect on the immune system. HIV patients using cannabinoid therapies have actually seen increases in their T-cell counts. However, it does seem very clear that acute and chronic alcohol exposure causes severe immunosuppression in humans.
That’s just one page in a 24-page mini-booklet, and already we’ve found five distortions or outright lies. Won’t you join me for some more debunking after the break?
Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 2:19 pm | By: Radical Russ
Hey, any time more than half of Americans think something good about marijuana, we're happy.
…but 44% think marijuana is equally as dangerous or more dangerous than alcohol!
Fifty-one percent (51%) of American adults say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 19% disagree and say pot is worse.
But 25% say both are equally dangerous. Just two percent (2%) say neither is dangerous.
Younger adults are more likely than their elders to view alcohol as the more dangerous of the two.
Unmarried adults are more critical of alcohol than those who are married. Those with children at home think alcohol is more dangerous than those without kids living with them.
This finding surprised me, as I figured parents with kids at home would be more likely to succumb to reefer madness hysteria. Is it really possible that a majority of parents would rather catch their kid smoking a joint than drinking a beer?
This I would attribute to the other illegal drugs and the tendency of their users to commit more crimes. I’d like to see the question narrowed down to just marijuana use; is it an issue of public health or criminal justice?
This number shows that we haven’t done a good enough job educating people about the contribution of marijuana to the profits of the Mexican cartels. Even with Arizona’s attorney general and others estimating 60%-70% of cartel profits stem from marijuana trafficking, it seems the people haven’t gotten the word. They also may believe that even if we did dry up their major funding source through marijuana legalization that the cartels would just shift their profits and violence to controlling the trafficking of hard drugs. Nobody ever stops to consider how the cartels are going to magically create millions of new American cocaine and heroin users to make up for the loss of marijuana business, especially when marijuana users would have greater access to a better product under legalization.
There is a reason there is no Cocaine Culture or Heroin Times magazines. Cocaine and heroin use most often are addictions; marijuana use is most often a lifestyle.
Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 2:30 pm | By: Radical Russ
Wanna protect your brain from this? Smoke a joint!
(Atlanta Journal-Constitution) Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, used high-tech scans to compare microscopic changes in brain white matter in teens aged 16 to 19 who were divided into three groups: binge drinkers (boys who consume five or more drinks at one sitting, and girls who have four or more drinks); binge drinkers who also smoked marijuana; and a control group with little or no experience with either alcohol or drugs.
As expected, the binge drinkers showed signs of white matter damage in all eight brain regions examined by the researchers. But the binge drinkers/marijuana users had less damage in seven out of the eight brain regions than the binge drinkers did. And compared to the control group, the binge drinkers/marijuana users had more white matter damage in only three regions.
The researchers wrote that brain white matter tracts were “more coherent in adolescents who binge drink and use marijuana than in adolescents who report only binge drinking.” They said it’s “possible that marijuana may have some neuroprotective properties in mitigating alcohol-related oxidative stress or excitotoxic cell death.”
So, naturally, when these 16-to-19-year-olds graduate and go to college, we immerse them in an alcohol-saturated party culture and forbid them from using cannabis. It is illegal for them to be using either drug, so we provide slap-on-the-wrist penalties for the alcohol use but kick them out of the dorms, surrender their college aid, require random urine screening, and saddle them with a criminal drug record that makes the top careers and positions all but impossible to attain.
Because we want to protect the children. For God’s sake, won’t somebody think about the children?!?
Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 8:42 am | By: Radical Russ
[UPDATE 1:01am ET: Climbed to #14... Glenn Beck's at #10... C'mon, Stashers, only two hours left on the Pacific clock! We gotta dislodge the Beckhole from the Top Ten!]
[UPDATE 12:12pm ET: Up to #16 and it still says "1 day in Top 100", so maybe it goes by Pacific Time and not Eastern.]
[UPDATE 11:45pm ET: Still at #17, but the price has dropped to $8.97. Last chance to hit the bomb!]
[UPDATE 11:00pm ET: #17!!! One hour to go... can we make the Top 15 at least?
[UPDATE 9:36pm ET: #20!!! We did it! Now keep pushing, West Coast, and let's aim for the Top Ten!]
[UPDATE 7:00pm ET: #22!...All right, West Coast, I'm calling you out to push it into the top 20!]
[UPDATE 6:02pm ET: #26... keep pushing to the Top Twenty!]
[UPDATE 5:15pm ET: #28 with a bullet!]
[UPDATE 4:20pm ET: #32 at 4:20]
[UPDATE 3:17pm ET: #38... I'm hoping Stashers getting off work on the East Coast will help push this into the Top Twenty. West Coasters, when you get off work at 5pm, there will only be four hours left on the East Coast for the bomb, so buy early, buy often!]
[UPDATE 2:09pm ET: #47... keep on buying!]
[UPDATE 1:36pm ET: Up to #76 and rising!]
[UPDATE 12:42pm ET: The bomb is working! "Marijuana is Safer" has risen from the #12,000's yesterday to above #200 already! Make it happen! Buy today!]
NORML’s Paul Armentano is the co-author of a remarkable new book, “Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?”. It is available through Amazon.com and today, 8/20, is the Marijuana Book Bomb promotion.
The idea is to drive up Amazon’s sales rankings (they measure daily) to make a book about marijuana law reform #1 on the charts for the first time ever. It is available today for 32% off the list price (only $10.17). If you don’t think marijuana is safer, this book will convince you. If you do think marijuana is safer, this book will provide the knowledge needed to make that case to others. It is one of my favorite marijuana books ever and I don’t just say that as a colleague of Paul’s – I read a lot of these books and this is one of the best-written most-informative easy-reads in the set.
Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 10:06 am | By: Radical Russ
(BBC News) Alcohol is largely to blame for an “alarming” rise in the rate of oral cancers among men and women in their forties, say experts.
Numbers of cancers of the lip, mouth, tongue and throat in this age group have risen by 26% in the past decade.
Alcohol consumption has doubled since the 1950s and is the most likely culprit alongside smoking, says Cancer Research UK.
Each year in the UK around 1,800 people die from the disease.
There are 5,000 newly diagnosed cases per year.
The charity’s health information manager Hazel Nunn said: “These latest figures are really alarming.
“Around three-quarters of oral cancers are thought to be caused by smoking and drinking alcohol.
“Tobacco is, by far, the main risk factor for oral cancer, so it’s important that we keep encouraging people to give up and think about new ways to stop people taking it up in the first place.”
But you know what doesn’t lead to an increase in oral cancer? Wait for it…
Seattle, WA: The use of marijuana, even long term, is not associated with an increased risk of developing oral cancer, according to the results of a large, population-based study published in the June issue of the journal Cancer Research.
Researchers found “no association” between marijuana use and the incidence of oral squamous-cell carcinoma, “regardless of how long, how much or how often a person has used marijuana,” according to a press release issued this week by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which conducted the study.
RevRayGreen: I'll post a pic of me and my son....gimme a minute
Missippi Hippy: Guess what... I'm gonna be a new... ummmmm well, my pet piggie Ganja is in labor and they ain't mine in the same sense. See what your wife [...]
RevRayGreen: days they didn't talk back..or act disrespectful..
RevRayGreen: feel so lucky my son is 18 going 19 and my daughter 16 going on 17..relish the days that can't talk back
Urb Age: Congrats Spof thats awesome. My little Clara is about to hit 20 months. Im not the activist I used to be, but its made me a better man.
Urb Age: Heck I was gonna go up there, but just not feeling well this weekend..Dang it, I hate it when that happens..
RevRayGreen: wishing I was hanging at NORML cafe...
JohnH: Just a quick comment about tokin' and sperm motility....been tokin since age 14 and have 8 kids ranging in age from 30 to 9...(what can I say, I found 2 [...]
slash5city: really ..oprah 35 yr or more in the closet toker ...outed ....o my god !!
SneakerPimp: that would be huge news just imagen the headline
RevRayGreen: maybe Oprah smokes and keeps it on the DL...
SneakerPimp: and good afternoon
mr reuben: I could do without seeing Rob K. on tv. But Bruce and Eithan get a big thumbs up from me.
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Some of the nation’s top athletes discuss why today's pros are turning to cannabis — and away from alcohol and painkillers — off the field, and question why pro sports leagues are continuing to sanction those who do. Moderator: Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com * Toby Grear, MMA fighter * Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmm […]
Cannabis Law Reform's Missing Link: Law Enforcement Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper; LEAP and NORML Advisory Board; Author of Breaking Rank Putting the Mexican Cartels Out of Business Mexican drug cartels now employ over 100,000 soldiers and are responsible for nearly ten thousand deaths per year. Their largest source of income is marijuana. […]
“But legalizing marijuana will cost society more than it earns in taxes” – debunked!
In the face of growing calls to tax and regulate marijuana, the prohibitionists are left with few tools in their rhetorical arsenal. One talking point they’ve trotted out lately goes something like this:
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